Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Teaching as Leadership

Know exactly what success looks like

Set big goals

Students make dramatic academic progress when, from the very beginning, teachers develop a clear, ambitious vision of success. Highly effective teachers know exactly where they want their students to be by the end of the year and realize that a bold (and some might say crazy) vision of student success can actually drive student achievement.

Related reading

Develop a desire for academic success

Invest students & their families

Many highly successful teachers (and experts) boil the idea of student investment down to two factors: the students belief that they are able to achieve at high levels alongside their desire to do so. Or, stated more simply:

Student investment= "I can" x "I want"

For any endeavor, consciously or not, students are asking themselves "Can I do this?" and "Do I want to do this?". Your responsibility is to be sure that every student answers yes to both questions. Here are three key elements of doing so:

How to get from there to here

Plan purposefully

Before taking any action, strong leaders ‐ be they in a board room, an operating room, or a classroom ‐ define the ultimate result they want, make clear how they will know they have succeeded and only then choose and design strategies to that end.

Think of purposeful planning ‐ for any type of plan, large or small ‐ as comprised of these three sequential principles:

Vision

First, develop a clear vision of success from which you can "plan backwards"

Plan

Every action matters - the large and the small

Execute effectively

Effective execution happens in the details of our everyday work. It means we follow through on our actions, big and small, so that we are not just doing what we intend to do but are actually having the effect we intend to have. For strong teachers, effective execution means ensuring that everything we do contributes to the goal of student learning.

We see three general characteristics exhibited by strong teachers as they implement plans: